‘It Felt Hyperreal’: Cailee Spaeny on Entering the Terrifying World of Alex Garland’s ‘Civil War’

Before donning a dark bouffant for Sofia Coppola’s 2023 film Priscilla, about the contentious relationship between Elvis and Priscilla Presley, Cailee Spaeny suited up for a different kind of battle on the set of Alex Garland’s Civil War. Starring in the film opposite Kirsten Dunst, the 25-year-old Missouri native spent months dodging flash blanks and learning tactical maneuvers from Navy SEALs to bring to life Garland’s vision of an America riven by violent internal conflict.

“I was the annoying young one on set who, every time they passed around earplugs, went, ‘Yeah, yeah, thank you,’ and just stuck them in my pocket,” says Spaeny. “Kirsten [Dunst] kept going, ‘Cailee, put the fucking earplugs in.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I want to feel it!’ That’s a classic young actor doing her thing—acting like she’s got to feel every moment—but for me, doing movies is just such an interesting experience,” she adds. “I wanted to dive into it as much as I could.”

Inspired by Garland’s upbringing as the son of a political cartoonist, the film opens as a coalition of states known as the Western Forces wage a multi-front campaign against the U.S. government and its fascist-leaning president (Nick Offerman). With Washington expected to fall to the Western Forces in a matter of days, three veteran war correspondents, Lee (Dunst), Joel (Wagner Moura), and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), make a plan to drive from New York to D.C., where journalists are being shot on sight, in the hopes of snagging a final interview with the president. To make it there, the group—which soon includes Spaeny’s Jessie, a scrappy, amateur photojournalist Lee saves from a suicide bombing—has to evade the lawless, conflict-torn towns and sadistic paramilitary groups that have cropped up since the country descended into civil war.

But it’s not the treacherous road trip, nor even the (largely uncontextualized) battle for control of the U.S., that seems to be Garland’s chief concern here. Instead, Civil War focuses intently on the knotty dynamic (sometimes familial, sometimes patently rivalrous) between Jessie and Lee—an ambitious, possibly opportunistic up-and-comer and the haunted professional who’s seen it all—and the role of journalists in a society on the brink of collapse. “The admiration and love for these journalists is the heart of the story,” Spaeny says. (The model turned formidable war correspondent Lee Miller was the namesake for Dunst’s character.) “The journalists are the heroes, but they are unbelievably complicated in the questions they have to ask themselves.” She refers to their “addict-like quality” as they hurl themselves deeper and deeper into an active war zone, recording mutilated bodies and sniper stand-offs along their route. Are they driven by duty, or merely a need to be where the action is? “The passing of the baton between Lee and Jessie and that soul connection they have, the moral ambiguity [of their mission], and the horrors [Lee’s] always having to work through—there’s a lot of things to pick apart,” she observes.